Bags have been utilized for packaging store-bought goods for many years. In places where trees are plentiful, paper bags are utilized, which are easily separated from one another for use as needed. In other areas, plastic bags are preferred. These bags are packaged in stacks of flattened bags, or are sold as perforated sheets rolled about a core.
Regardless of the type or design of the bags used, the bags themselves are costly, so it is preferable to the storeowner that each customer take only as many bags as needed for his or her purchases. In particular, at present many customers take home a number of empty plastic bags for a variety of personal uses, in addition to those needed to wrap the customer's purchases. Furthermore, since plastic bags do not degrade, the billions and billions of plastic bags thrown away today are clogging up the land, the drains, the rivers, and the seas, and creating a severe, world-wide environmental problem. In order to solve this problem, some countries, like Ireland, have begun collecting taxes for each plastic bag taken from stores. In other areas, stores have begun charging customers for the bags they use or take away. Yet another solution is biodegradable plastic bags, although these are expensive to produce and have so far proved unsatisfactory in use.
Furthermore, since the bags are generally of plastic film, it is often difficult to open them. They usually must be crumpled or one side rubbed against the other, in order to open them. In order to solve this problem, an automatic bag dispenser was disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,006,495. This device is located adjacent the cash register, under a conveyor or shelf, and includes two parallel rollers arranged to rotate in opposite directions and to engage a single bag between them, thereby folding the bag and removing it from the stack. The bottom of the bag, which is engaged first, is passed through a slot into a container, where one side of the bag remains held by the device. This permits the other side of the bag to be grabbed and the bag opened for filling with groceries.
Another approach was suggested in Japanese Patent No. 05-151439, which discloses a bag dispensing machine which dispenses one bag at a time. This Japanese patent describes a device including housing for holding a stack of bags having two side handles and a central frangible portion having a through-going hole for hanging the bags. The bags are hung by this hole on an elongate hook in the housing, and pressed by one or two spring-biased plates against a roller coupled by a belt to a motor in the housing. When a bag is to be dispensed, the motor causes the roller to rotate, thereby pulling the front-most bag from the stack, which falls against a pivoting door, for removal by a shopper. The motor is arranged to drive the driveshaft for a predetermined number of rotations.
This machine suffers from a number of disadvantages. First, the motor is operated for a predetermined number of rotations, but there is no automatic way to ascertain whether a bag (or more than one bag) has actually been pulled down by the roller. In other words, no control mechanism is provided to ensure that one bag, and only one bag, has been dispensed. Second, in the embodiment of FIG. 1, at least, the customer has access to the entire stack of the bags, since the door for bag removal is located adjacent the bag stack, and can remove as many bags as desired. In addition, the user can pull the bag before it has been completely dispensed, thereby interfering with operation of the device, which could cause malfunction. Third, there is nothing to prevent the removed bag from inadvertently winding about the roller and becoming entangled. Fourth, the device has no indication whether a user has actually removed a dispensed bag. Thus, an instruction can be received for dispensing a further bag, and the machine will dispense another bag, even though a bag is already available.
Accordingly, there is a long felt need for a bag dispensing device which dispenses only one bag at a time and includes a control unit for controlling the number and rate of bags dispensed, and it would be very desirable to have such a device wherein the customer has no access to the stack of bags, but only to the dispensed bag or bags.